SpecFic Spotlight: V. L. Dreyer

After 2 long years of slaving over a hot keyboard, my latest release is the final book in the Survivors series. Now I’ve moved on to working on my science fiction romance series, The Immortelle, and I’m giving serious thought to starting work on my hard sci-fi series, The Gyrath’s Gate Chronicles. I’ve been working on Chronicles on and off since I was a teenager, and it would be nice to finally tackle the project now that I have experience as both a writer and a publisher, not to mention the support of a strong set of freelance specialists.

How did I first get into writing, I hear you ask? Funny story, that. I never made a conscious decision to become a speculative fiction writer. I’ve always been one, even as a child. I was raised by a mother who wanted to be a teacher, and she surrounded me with books from the moment I was old enough not to tear the pages out. I always knew I wanted to tell stories. I’m a world-builder. That’s my nature, and has been for as long as I can remember. As a teenager, everyone told me that being an author was an impossible daydream, and for a while I listened to them. I failed miserably at a normal life, and ended up suffering from terrible depression.

After ten years of fighting my nature and failing, it was a combination of medical conditions that finally forced me to accept who I am. In 2007, I had a bad fall and suffered a prolapsed spinal column, and later that same year I contracted a terrible fever that raged so long and hard that it left me with permanent damage.

In August 2012, I was told there was a chance I could go deaf and lose the ability to walk. At that stage, I was working in a call centre and suffering so badly that I spent more time off sick than at my desks. After months of panicking and terrible uncertainty about my future, something inside me broke – or perhaps snapped back into place is a better way to put it.
What could I do with my life that wouldn’t require being able to hear or walk?
Perhaps the very thing that I’d always sensed was my destiny?

On December 1st 2012, I sat down and began work on The Survivors Book I: Summer. On December 31st 2012, the first draft was done. It went to print on August 1st 2013. By December 2013, it was an international best seller.

For the first time in my life, I was successful at something, and I felt like I was doing what I was always meant to do. Today, I have five titles to my name, four of which regularly grace Amazon’s best seller’s lists. At this rate, by the end of 2015 I will be completely self-sufficient, and it feels so good.

My number one writing tip? Never give up. Success is a long, hard, painful slog, and sometimes you wonder if you’ll ever get there. But you can – and eventually, you will. You just need to persevere.

SpecFicNZ Spotlight

For those living far far away from New Zealand, our country may sound distant, peculiar, full of mountains, tattooed Māori warriors, hobbits, rugby players and… what else, again? Stereotypes thrive out there, especially when writers look for Kiwi inspirations–only to find the same generic information over and over again. SpecFicNZ …

Featured Works

Use Only As Directed, edited by Simon Petrie and Edwina Harvey A varied mix of 14 speculative fiction stories by some of the best Australian and New Zealand authors in the genre in settings that range from the back yard to the depths of space. Authors: Stephen Dedman, Dirk Flinthart, …